


your heart is a mineshaft

by raumdeuter



Series: team spirit [4]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rivers of London Fusion, M/M, POV Second Person, one last love letter to my horrible slytherin dads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 13:30:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11105559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raumdeuter/pseuds/raumdeuter
Summary: There is some part of Xabi that has always been longing to come home, the same way there is some part of you that has always been longing to make it your own.





	your heart is a mineshaft

**Author's Note:**

> this started as a spiritual successor to "we're still the same, we're still the same," and then david and thomas sang [a horrible austrian song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TijMytq3j4) to philipp during the meisterfeier and i tripped and it turned into wizards au
> 
> but it's still regular old non-magical football if you squint
> 
> (also this is rushed, disjointed, and very obviously unedited, so proceed with caution)

Kalle and Uli are very pleasant about your retirement, all things considered: they make all the right pleas for you to reconsider, then offer all the right congratulations when you don’t.

The meeting doesn’t go sour until the talk turns to what you’ll do after, and by then it’s too late: by then you’ve already made up your mind. You’ll retire in glory, and then do what needs to be done.

 

\---

 

Xabi has told you before that there’s old magic in the Bernabéu, that even with Casillas gone and the power not as strong as it was before you would do well to take care.

You try to pay him heed--you know, by now, to listen to Xabi when he cares to share his knowledge with you--but it doesn’t matter in the end. There’s only so much you can do against a tidal wave, even when you know the wave is coming. You fight like hell and it isn’t enough--you fight like hell, and your chances fall flat, your shots fizzle away to nothing, and even before it’s all over you know, with a terrible certainty, what the outcome will be.

You remember, absurdly, a night in Bloemfontein: sweat and beer and you and Miro on the touchline, after, searching for hints of vestigia. You think you understand, now, how Lampard must have felt.

After the final whistle Xabi comes to you with the look of someone who has gambled it all and lost. You’ve seen the look before, on other men. It suits Xabi better than most.

He looks a different sort of hollow than you feel: you can almost hear the empty clank of his ribcage against yours as he pulls you into an embrace. He murmurs something low and soothing into your ear, finding the right words as always, and you let it wash over you.

 

\---

 

Thomas tells you they aren’t renewing Holger’s contract about a day before you hear it from one of your innumerable sources, and the only mercy about any of it is you don’t need to feign surprise.

There’s a weariness to his voice you haven’t heard in a long while. Not since before you knew what it meant. You have to wonder, privately, how much it has affected his performance. It would be an easy excuse for him to give to anyone who knows, but he’s never said anything to you.

“Maybe I should tell the bosses about him,” he says. “If he leaves the Buli there’s no telling what he might turn into on the pitch.”

He’s joked, before, about how Holger is tied to his magic--at least, you thought it was a joke at the time.

“You can’t do anything about it?” There’s nothing else you can think to say. You don’t get angry in quick, white-hot flashes like Thomas: it’s not often you get angry at all, and when you do it’s a slow ice-cold trickle that builds until you have enough of it to do something useful. You know it's been building for a long while, but not now. Not yet.

Thomas laughs. “My dear Philipp, if we could control everything about our clubs, what would be the point of football?”

 

\---

 

It’s almost fitting that you’re the one to fuck it up against Dortmund. You’ve always liked to be in control of your own fate, and you’ve never felt it as much as you have now: a misplaced pass, a badly timed run, and the last hope you’d dared to give yourself vanishes into the air.

Afterward Xabi says nothing at all. He lets his hands do the talking and his mouth proves a talented enough distraction in other ways, and it’s oddly comforting in a way you wouldn’t have expected of him when you’d met him three years ago.

(You think you can guess what he would have said, if he were indelicate enough to. All short jokes aside, you’ve grown used to standing in other captains’ shadows.)

 

\---

 

Basti calls you from Chicago and tells you how he’s been.

He sounds happy. Relaxed, even. You’ve seen the photographs. He stands taller now as a tourist than he ever had on the pitch. It doesn’t surprise you. The pressure had always got to him more.

So this is it, you think: this is how it ends. He’s fought and bled for Bayern, for Germany, for the chance to claw his way out of his own shadow, and now that the crowd counts him a deity, now that they cry _Fußballgott_ after his name--now he thinks he’s finally earned the right to leave.

A god never quite stops being a god, no matter what he does, no matter if he isn’t really one after all. You know, as he knows, that even if he were to leave for years, for decades, the Südkurve would welcome him back with open arms.

Suddenly you find you hate him for it, just a little.

He bleeds red in Chicago, the same way he’d bled in Manchester, but a false red, a pale imitation of red. They still call him _Fußballgott_ there, but the name rings hollow and the accent is wrong.

He tells you to visit sometime. You tell him you’ll think about it, and he believes you.

 

\---

 

The megaphone feels cold and foreign in your hands when they pass it down to you. There’s a euphoria that comes with winning the league, even after so many times, and you feel it now, but even through the fog of joy you know this is wrong. For one thing you haven’t got the voice for it, but for another you know that of all the unspoken rules this is one of the longest unbroken. The Humba is Thomas’s job, and before that it was Olli’s. As for you: it isn’t your right.

And then, slowly, but with rising surety, you hear the crowd begin to sing your name, the way they never have before, and suddenly it seems perfectly natural to raise the megaphone to your lips and shout the familiar words.

Later Thomas tells the press that he’s not a romantic (true enough), and that the world will go on spinning even after you retire (also true, if less pleasant to think about).

He doesn’t tell them what he tells you, in the emptiness of the dressing room, after everyone else has gone: that if anyone deserves to break the rules again, it’s you.

 

\---

 

That weekend Adidas pulls you and Xabi aside for a shoe commercial thinly disguised as a walk down memory lane, but you don’t mind it so much after a while; Xabi’s German is good enough by now that he understands you perfectly, your words fitting in seamlessly around each other, an easy back and forth, so that when you accidentally slip into English the two of you barely notice.

He talks with impressive ease about Istanbul, about winning La Decima for the fans, and it occurs to you that regardless of how much he’s saying must be lies, he’s as honest with you here, now, as he ever has been. There is some part of Xabi that has always been longing to come home, the same way there is some part of you that has always been longing to make it your own.

 

\---

 

You would never admit it to anyone, least of all yourself, but you find yourself dreading having to hand the armband over to Thomas. You had expected to hand it to Manu, which might have been easier, but Manu isn’t here: Manu is in rehab at Säbener Straße, having spent every ounce of his own magic holding a broken foot together for a hundred and twenty minutes, and so instead it’s Thomas who’s standing in front of you now, a crooked grin on his face, his arm outstretched.

It isn’t often _genii_ aren’t also captains. You’ve known where you stand for a long time; you know Thomas has never questioned your role as benevolent usurper. Still, you half-expect this to hurt: like you had only stolen the armband for a time, despite everything you did in its name, and are now returning it to its rightful owner.

But it doesn’t. The moment you fold the velcro over his arm something about the universe settles neatly into place, like you’ve found the last piece to a puzzle you hadn’t realized you were putting together.

Thomas tips a wink at you as you jog off the pitch. In the distance, they’re singing your name again.

 

\---

  ****

Twenty years ago a scout from 1860 came to you and asked you to join a team with a hole in its training pitch fence, and you turned him down because you refused to settle for anything less than the best.

Maybe it’s typical Bayern arrogance to think of only winning the league in your final season as _settling_. But in the end it comes down to this: you on the balcony, holding a single trophy aloft, all of Munich at your feet, already looking ahead to what will come.

“It’s an unconventional way to wage a war, I will give you that,” says Xabi.

You raise an eyebrow, pretending you haven’t understood. He tilts his head in silent acknowledgement and comes to stand by you. Below, someone notices and starts a cheer, which spreads out across Marienplatz like a wave.

He grabs your arm and lifts it above your head, prompting another cheer. In your ear, he says, “It will be an interesting retirement, to be sure.”

“I’m surprised you noticed,” you say. You really ought to have seen this coming, especially from Xabi, who has always been good at reading between the lines. In a way, you did. You just didn’t think he’d care.

He stays at your side as you both step back and the team closes in around you again. “The thing about football,” he murmurs, his lips barely moving, “is that it is always about business in the end. Many people are swept up in the narrative and forget. You haven’t.”

You smile a patented schoolboy smile at him. “I intend to take a long vacation away from football. I meant every word of what I said.”

“You always do. But vacations come to an end, don’t they?”

This is what you know. You know there are as many ways of coming home again as there are of leaving it. You know that Holger deserved the megaphone as much as you did.

You know that when the walls come crumbling down and the old guard finally lay down their swords in surrender, Xabi Alonso won’t be at your back. But he’ll be watching from a safe distance, waiting to congratulate you after the dust has settled, and that has to count for something.

“ _Schaun mer mal_ ,” you say, and he smiles.

 

 


End file.
